“Unlike other veterans of Bill Clinton’s Administration—such as Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke (Lake’s equally ambitious rival in the foreign service class of 1962 who is considered to be a frontrunner for Secretary of State in a Hillary Clinton administration and is also Jewish), Lake chose not to support Hillary Clinton.

“Instead, he threw his weight behind Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama, to whom he is now senior foreign policy advisor. Lake was one of the first members of the Washington, D.C. Democratic foreign policy establishment to notice Obama. He heard about him in 2002 while in Chicago to give a speech about civil liberties with Federal Appeals Court Judge Abner Mikva, a former congressman from the Chicago area. “Somebody asked me if I would talk to this guy who was a state senator who had decided to run for the U.S. Senate but had no chance,” Lake remembers. “Would I talk to him about foreign policy? I said, ‘Sure.'”